Level 1 1/2: Contact with Soap Appears to Cause Hives, Grocery Carts Begin to Seem Like a Convenient Method of Possession Storage and Transport.
I got my roots done today. I was only about four months behind on that. I just kept gritting my teeth in a blond ponytail and a brown head trying to push it to May, I don't know why. And then yesterday this client of ours who owns a salon came into the office. She winced at me. Made the sign of the cross. Forced me to get on the phone and make an emergency appointment lest she return with a jug of Clorox and a priest. I guess to people with standards it was pretty bad, I don't know. Having hair all one color makes me feel special occasion-ish, like I should be in someone's wedding. That's a 3 out of a possible 10 on the Scale Of Personal Maintenance, FYI, and since a score of 2 has me brushing my teeth with a spit-dampened tee shirt hem, a 3 is a celebration.
On that subject exactly, my car smells weird. I have a ridiculously small car, too; it can either hold two people or one person and one handbag. Two people with handbags have to hail a cab to follow with the handbags. There's not a lot of room for bad smelling things to hide, is my point. For a while I thought maybe I was imagining it because the smell would dissipate after a few minutes, but I've been around the stinky block long enough to know that all
that means is that Bad Smell and my olfactory sense are becoming friends. I keep trying to nail it down as soon as I get in the car because I know I only have a few brief inhales before Bad Smell and I become one for the duration of the journey, so every time I open the door it goes something like this: "Moldy tortillas! Ammonia! Wet bathing suits! Melting plastic! Leather! Shampoo! Deodorant! Air! Damn!" The worst case scenario here is that all of it is actually just me.
"Knowing you it's probably
food," Randy laughed. For a second I was offended. Like I'm the
one driver out of forty billion who has dared live the dream that is eating behind the wheel. As if I haven't witnessed Randy sucking back king crab legs on the I-10 during rush hour on a conference call. That's the last time I hold
his votive butter warmer. But then I realized that he could have said a lot worse: "Knowing you it's probably a forgotten hostage," for example. Or "Knowing you it's probably excrement." He was really just paying me a compliment, see? Randy's really a big sweetheart if you have forty-five minutes to an hour to twist and analyze everything he says into something totally different than what actually came out of his mouth.
I mentioned it to my boss the other day. "Oh, it's not a mouse, is it? That maybe climbed up into the engine and got caught?" Well, we'll never know because I'm never, ever going to open my hood now. Ever. I drove her to pick her car up from the shop later that day and as soon as she got in my car I asked if she could smell anything. She paused. Awkwardly. Significantly.
"It's not...
unbearable," she said.
Oh. Good. Okay, so I've got a few weeks then before I have to call Hazmat to come out and set the whole deal on fire. I'm officially not telling anyone else. I will deal with Bad Smell in my own Level 3 way. I will continue to sniff-hypothesize and eventually whatever it is will either disintegrate or hatch. "It will take care of itself or it won't" is the Level 3 credo.
Saturday I'm flying out to Georgia to spend some much-needed quality time with my sweet grandmother. And then midweek Caitlin will pick me up and we will drive to a Florida beach to get awesome with
some of my favorite people. This is going to be a difficult transition, if only because half of the week I will be forced to strive for Level 7 (maybe even 8 on Sunday), but the rest of the week will not see me rise above a Level 1
1/2. When I get home my car will no doubt smell glorious.
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Don't tell him-- he'll become crazed with the power.
We're in Mexico right now and my Blogger dashboard is in Spanish. For a second I got confused and a little panicked-- how will I know what to do??? what if I innocently delete the whole thing because I can't READ THE WORDS???-- but then I remembered that like 85% of blogger blogs are actually manned by cats. After four years I've probably subconsciously got it down. "Publicar". I'm on it. Athank
you, sir.
Randy's out buying batteries and a new cheese grater and trying to find someone who can repair the tile counter top and renewing his insurance for the year. I'm scratching my leg and squinting in the sun and blogging in a filthy ponytail. The Jake is sleeping. Check, check, and check.
For the ride down I put Billy Joel's "Allentown" on my mp3 player. I won't say it's the
worst decision I've ever made, but I won't say it isn't.
In the four hours it took to drive down here I swore I heard the Outlook Email Notifier Noise no less than six times, meaning
that was the number of times I almost decapitated myself in my vain, strangled, Pavlovian efforts to locate the "send/receive" button on the stereo. Randy made an Outlookish "hmmm" noise this morning in his sleep and I almost jammed his eyes out trying to Refresh my inbox. And I wasn't even awake yet. If he could learn to make that noise and then throw it like a vaudevillian puppeteer, he could have me chasing cheese graters and 9-volts all over this town.
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And if not tomorrow, Saturday for sure.
Last week several of our vendors stopped by the office to deliver tax-time survival baskets. I didn't know we
had vendors. I still don't know what they "vend", exactly. Numbers? Here's a free pen, call if you need any nines? But hey, free stuff is free stuff. And then I looked in the baskets. Eye drops. Tylenol. Theraflu. Rolaids. I think there was a hand grenade near the bottom. While my accountant brethren fought over the Halls and the Visine, I scrounged for something edible that wasn't a chewable caplet. I unearthed a single pack of gum and New Girl read the label over my shoulder.
"'Exotic flavor'? Try it," she said, "see if it tastes like a bird." Then she made a noise like a macaw whereupon I immediately asked her to marry me. She said no. So I settled for trying the gum.
"Well, do you feel like you just brushed your teeth?" she asked.
"No," I said. But since I hadn't actually brushed my teeth that morning I knew any
clean feeling was going to be a long shot. In the interest of communal office space I left that part out. "But I don't feel like I just chewed up a tropical bird, either, so it's a push."
Then I stole the gum so I could take a picture of it. It's pretty good gum. The end.
It's been almost two months since I
slammed my thumb in the back door of the house.
I don't know which is worse: my smashed and battered thumbnail, or that my thumb in general looks like it just weakly climbed out of a month-long sitz bath. I never realized that I have enough extra thumb skin to make a short robe. At this rate Thumb should be back to normal in time to hastily shield my eyes when I forget and stare directly into the next
solar eclipse.
The
weird brown ice chest continues to not be a package. But each day brings fresh hope.
I bet tomorrow's the day it's a UPS package and not a cooler. I can't wait to see what I get!
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BoB!
We
won! Thank you so much to everyone who voted-- it's great to know that someone other than me thinks this ridiculous website is funny. I was rereading some stuff recently and having second-thoughts; I started thinking about trying to get my shit together, maybe financing a four-day weekend in rehab or a motivational clinic or something. But if we're all on the same page, fuck
that. I'M
FINE, PROBABLY.
A special high five to
Antonia. If I've watched
this video once I've watched it eight thousand times. I'm hoping she's serious about the Sartre; I've got my notebook all ready.
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He ordered scotch on the rocks. That was my first clue.
Last night was
that annual formal fund raiser Randy's charity group puts on. After six consecutive years of attendance, for me it's become less about feeling philanthropically superior and more about discovering new and excruciating ways to let my inner idiot shine. Year One was great-- Randy wasn't a member of the group yet so we attended as guests. I mingled amicably, won a lot of money on the charity craps table, generally kept the menace in check, left with both feet inside shoes. Year Two I spilled a full glass of red wine on a judge in a tuxedo. I tried unsuccessfully to talk a bunch of people I don't know into bailing in favor of the strip club. Ultimately I left shoeless. And crying. Some people claim there's honor in meticulous social propriety; as someone who can roll from respectable to rock bottom faster than anyone you know, I loudly and drunkenly dispute that claim. Preferably in front of a crowd. With a minister in it.
Yesterday afternoon, the Eve of Year Six, my only real preparations were of the mental fortification variety and some light flogging. I wore the
same dress I've worn for the last seventeen years. At this point the only thing that's been in my closet longer is my high school graduation gown. Anyone who dared compliment me on it was rewarded with a sincere, "Yeah, thanks, I wear it every year." Surprisingly enough, compliments weren't really a pressing issue.
Randy was in charge of registration this year so he and I stood outside distributing packets to twelve hundred attendees. Right up my proverbial alley, registration, as I'm a natural stander arounder and I essentially have a masters degree in the alphabet. So I'm standing, right, in my thirty-four year-old dress, obviously doing a bang up job, when suddenly two men in tuxedos usher another man in a white suit through the door behind me without picking up a registration packet. And just as I'm about to go into my Registration Flailing Screech Attack Mode (patent pending), it dawns on me that the man in the white suit was Sean Connery.
"They said there was going to be a special guest," another woman says, handing out packets.
"Yeah, but usually that just means someone's bringing a hooker." I hadn't even had a drink yet and already I was a festering ulcer of propriety.
I spent the next two hours outwardly handing out envelopes, inwardly working on a schematic to have sex with Sean Connery. Not because I particularly wanted to, but because he was within five hundred feet of me and intrinsically it seemed like the thing to do. You know how babies instinctively know to hold their breath when dipped underwater? I instinctively know to sleep with Sean Connery. It's exactly the same thing. As it turns out, however, someone hired a Connery look alike for the evening, the knowledge of which snapped me out of my adapted mammalian dive reflex. Apparently it doesn't cover look alikes and, as
CW pointed out, I need another quote/unquote "Fauxnery" notch on my belt like I need another... notch on my belt. Fool me four times.
Last year there was a woman at the benefit, fresh-faced and pretty, a friend of a friend. She kept inviting me to this professional grade kickboxing class in an abandoned armory and I kept professing my interest in attending. The more she asked, the more I didn't want to go, so it was odd that my responses became somehow increasingly affirmative and enthusiastic. In the long run I managed to get out of it, but when I found out that same girl was going to be there again this year I sat down and had an earnest, soul-searching conversation with myself about the importance of coming up with quicker lies.
The good news this year is that I didn't clamor to kickbox a panther, the bad news is that I'm still a complete idiot. Endure the pain as I betray myself three times:
TIME THE FIRST: GIRL: "They're auctioning off a cabin in Pinetop for a week! We should try to get it!"
ME:
[unraveling my forty-three year old hem] "Oh, that'd be so much fun! I'm in for half of that!"
There was a puppy in this auction that went for three thousand, five hundred dollars. It wasn't even pedigreed; the auction description read, "small brown and white animal, probably mostly dog." For
thirty-five hundred dollars. So how much could a vacation home for seven nights POSSIBLY go for?
TIME THE SECOND:
GIRL:
[looks over her shoulder, trembling bid paddle in hand] "It's up to over a thousand; are you really serious? You want to get it?"
ME:
[distracted, making room on my bar stool for the keg-sized bottle of gin that's just mysteriously manifested] "Make it so, Number One!"
TIME THE THIRD:
GIRL:
[excited, fresh face flushed] "We got it! Oh, we're going to have so much fun!"
ME: "Got what? How do you get the pour stopper out of this bottle neck, you think?"
GIRL: "The cabin! We got it!"
ME: "Does anyone have a Leatherman or something?"
Two thousand, four hundred dollars. Was the damage. I know this is going to come as a complete surprise, but Randy was completely unaware any of this was happening. When he happened on the scene his first order of business was to separate me from my gin keg. And then I sort of told him the story.
"So how much?" he asked, calmly peeling my fingers off the bottle one by one.
I pretended to cough to buy more time.
"Did you just pretend to cough to buy more time?"
I answered with a cough.
The best part, I learned four seconds later, is that the cabin in question actually belongs to a friend of ours, and-- ha ha!-- he would have let us use it for free if we had just asked.
"It's like that story," I said to Randy in the car on the way home, "where the husband sells his watch to buy his wife a silver comb for her hair and the wife sells her hair to buy her husband a watch chain."
"Oh, it's just like that," said Randy. "Only instead of a watch it was a shitload of cash, and instead of hair you're a giant moron. Hey," he added. "Where are your shoes?"
I don't know. I don't know where my shoes are. I should have just slept with Fauxnery in the bathroom. It might have proved beneficial to cloak myself in a shame shield. Plus it might have hidden the cocktail sauce stain on my fifty-two year old dress. I'm wearing my graduation gown next year, to hell with it. It's bright orange, it'll be perfect. Plus I already have a matching hat.
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If I finish this return before 2:00 I'm allowed to suck on a wet washcloth!
It’s April 14th. And while I’ve long since abandoned all of my initial fondness for Taxes, in the interest of self preservation I’ve been forced to invent completely new fondnesses. For instance, as of this week I love that Taxes has promised to let me go after next Tuesday. I respect that Taxes is a benevolent captor, and if I play my cards right and quit trying to scream for help through this gag he might not even shoot me in the kneecaps. Which to me sounds like a completely reasonable proposition! Randy called earlier and said that it sounded suspiciously like Stockholm Syndrome. I wasn’t allowed to answer him verbally, of course, but I furiously mashed a lot of buttons on the receiver. I think he got my point.
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If there's a Weird Brown Ice Chest dance, I'm sad to say I haven't been apprised
When I pulled into the driveway tonight after work there was a cardboard box sitting next to the garage door. Yay, package! What'd I get? What'd I get? What'd I get? What'd I get? I sort of parked and danced the "What'd I Get" dance out of the car and over to the box.
Where I discovered that what
looked like a delicious UPS delivery was actually our weird brown ice chest that must have gotten kicked out of the garage somehow. So I low slumped over to where my car had rolled and slumpily yanked the emergency brake. And slumped inside. To slump on the sofa. Where I'm still slumping. Currently. Real time slump.
I would have moved Weird Brown back into the garage, but then how would I be horribly disappointed
tomorrow night when I get home? Plus it's been out there for like three weeks. There's no rush. One day I'll find an actual package at the door and I won't know what to do with myself. I'll probably rip it open in the driveway and dump a bunch of ice and sodas inside it.
Sluuuuuump.
Go read these
two entries. Very funny. And very close to home.
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Last Easter my parents and I were standing in the courtyard of their church waiting for the early service to adjourn when this boy walked out of the sanctuary. About nine years old, clean cut, tiny suit, shiny shoes, tied tie. Good looking kid. Doing Easter proud. Except! He had a full-sized bed pillow on top of his head.
At first I thought, wow. I can't believe this kid's parents woke him up, got him all dressed up like a tiny senator, and then let him bring a bed pillow with him to church. But... even if they
did, why were they letting him wear it around on his head in front of a hundred God-fearing people on Easter Sunday? Speaking from experience,
my mom had a reaction time of point-three seconds when it came to slapping stupid shit off the top of my head-- it may have been an intrinsic response, like sneezing. She swatted a navy sunhat off my head one time and I was fifteen feet away. And in college. Not only that, but my watch said it was almost ten o'clock; not exactly the sunrise service. In my opinion any kid who had reached "biped" status could handle sitting upright for an hour.
My parents and I were mesmerized. We watched this boy walk casually over to the cookie table with some friends, pillow bobbing. No one grabbed for the pillow, none of his nine-year-old friends knocked it off or tried to hit someone in the face with it. Everyone pretended like it didn't exist, like this kid's face wasn't 40% masked by pale blue pillowcase.
"What if it's a medical condition?" I whispered to my mom. But honestly, the only medical condition that came to mind was an awkward stalled skull growth situation a la
Joe Dirt. I am now officially not a doctor for 4,90
2 reasons.
"And if it is, they couldn't find something a little more...
orthopedic?" My mom whispered back. We both marveled that the pillow never seemed to waver, never required a steadying hand. When he left-- paper cup of punch in one hand, his mom's hand in the other-- I wanted to follow him. What would happen when he got in the car? Would he duck and take PillowTop with him? How in the world would his dad see out the rearview?
Obviously I didn't follow. I went to church, like a good daughter (albeit one who didn't go to medical school). And then spent twelve months thinking about a kid I don't know in a dark suit wearing a pillow on his head. So when my mom called and asked me to go to Easter services this year, how could I refuse? The lure of closure alone! I would meet said kid in the courtyard. It would be windy and the Visitors' Table would need paperweights but the pillow (by now maybe queen size?) would rest atop his dome like a Zen Master's id, nonplussed and unimpressed. We would come to some understanding, shake hands. Maybe he'd let me pat him gently on the pillow, I don't know. But he didn't show this year. I walked around and around the church courtyard and all I found was a bunch of really genuinely nice people. With no pillows on their heads. Lot of good that did
me.
Happy Easter? Pffff. Whatever.
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For the last... six or so years, Randy has become increasingly puzzled by the number of water glasses I have in our bathroom at any given time. This morning that bewilderment reached an incredulous crescendo when he loudly announced that I was, quote, "Turning into that little girl from
Signs." I just rolled over and yawned because seriously, it takes more than an insinuation that I'm waiting for chameleon aliens to come scuttling out of the cornfield to get me up in the morning. But then later when I walked into the bathroom, I saw this:
Four ridiculously full glasses of water. Not an overwhelming amount for
you maybe, but if you know
me then you know I haven't internalized that much water since post-Spring Break of '96, and only then because the Mexican urgent care wouldn't give me a Diet Coke. Okay, Randy. I know when to concede.
A: Not to you directly, ever, but on the internet. On a blog you don't read. You win, Baby. There's enough water there to badly burn a whole girl scout troop of blendy aliens, I admit it. That said, please note that I will never own this in a one-on-one conversation and that I will in fact do my best to increase the number of full cups in the bathroom at any given time. I may start filling up soup bowls, I haven't decided yet. And count on seeing a baseball bat under the counter soon. Let's really sell this thing.
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I didn't ask if it was weird, I asked if it was sweet.
Of the many games Randy plays with Captain The Jake (the Wait Game, the Flip The Jake Game, the See If Jake Will Eat It Game), my favorite is the Set The Jake On Fire Game. At some point over the course of a television evening, Randy will inevitably announce that it's time to set the dog on fire. The dog is usually lying on Randy's feet when this announcement is made and while he could probably make a lumbering run for it, he's learned that any attempts to flee usually result in a game of Flip The Jake (wherein Jake ends up flipped over across Randy's lap like an eighty-pound panda baby) and he hates that game more because it necessitates additional movement. So The Long Suffering Jake sighs and stays where he is while Randy leans over and starts scratching him, faster and faster, the goal here of course being to set the dog on fire.
"Look! I think he's smoking!" Randy says, scratching like a madman, always right before Jake slowly rolls over onto his fat side, and from there onto his fat back, and from there onto his side again, and by then he's in the middle of the room and officially not aflame.
"Almost!" Randy always yells. "So close, did you see? He was almost on fire." And then, disappointed, he Flips The Jake.
It's sweet, really, because there was a whole lot of time there where The Jake was not exactly at the top of Randy's Favorite Things In The House list. He was a reluctant dog owner at best and that first year was really a trial, what with the expense of the fence and the doggy door, coming home to find our entire DVD catalog strewn across the lawn like so many shiny ripped twenty dollar bills, and that whole "jumping out a forty foot window" thing. But over the years Jake has matured into a sweet and obedient part of our family, and these silly games are a reassuring sign of how much Randy loves The Jake and how much he enjoys having him around.
I need you to agree with me on this. Because this morning I woke up with a core body temperature of a hundred and seventeen. I had opened my eyes and was digging my way out from underneath the comforter when I realized that our queen-sized duvet had been carefully folded into thirds to form a narrow nine-foot high wall of feather insulated doom, and that it had then been placed squarely on top of me.
I stopped digging. Somewhere around my feet a gaggle of potatoes finished baking and rustled their foil.
"I... I think I'm catching on fire!" I hollered to where I heard Randy getting ready in the bathroom.
"Won't be long now!" he sang back, sticking his head through the doorway and adjusting his tie.
That's sweet, right? Isn't that sweet?
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Thank you!
When I was 18 and the Powerball lottery came to Arizona for the first time I bought a ticket. One solitary ticket, the computer picked the numbers, and I watched on live television that night as four out of my five numbers were air-bounced out of the lottery number ball machine. The fifth number on my ticket was "43". The fifth winning Powerball number that night was "42". I missed winning $100,000 by one digit of one number. Four matching numbers won me $100, but who cares?
I certainly didn't care about a measly hundred dollars-- all
I could do was sit in the bathtub for two days and contemplate the stupid, cheap, stupid universe.
I told you that to tell you this: The very nice people over at
The Best of Blogs have nominated Out of Character for the funniest blog of 2006. It would be fantastic if you could go over there and vote for me. I can't afford to spend another two days in the bathtub; I have neither the time nor the skin elasticity.
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Four ridiculously full glasses of water. Not an overwhelming amount for you maybe, but if you know me then you know I haven't internalized that much water since post-Spring Break of '96, and only then because the Mexican urgent care wouldn't give me a Diet Coke. Okay, Randy. I know when to concede.
